Tuesday, October 16, 2012

American Extermination: Death for Sale in Every Aisle

Your local grocery store is serving up death in every aisle. Even you shop carefully, you run the risk of being like a bug to be exterminated, unknowingly bringing home glossy, sweet-smelling poison to the rest of your colony.

GMOs masquerading as healthy fruits and vegetables, produce and meat tainted with salmonella due to unsafe handling, and processed foods laced with neurotoxins lurk on every aisle. Food “safety” is for sale and it really doesn’t matter, as long as the big companies continue to turn a profit.

In a special report, Bloomberg Markets broke the story last week about paid food safety auditors that are basically paid to look the other way when inspecting food processing facilities. Every day, people are dying from unsafe practices while auditors are awarding gold stars to the people who are paying them.

The food industry hires for-profit inspection companies — known as third-party auditors — who aren’t required by law to meet any federal standards and have no government supervision. Some of these monitors choose to follow guidelines from trade groups that include ConAgra Foods Inc. (CAG), Kraft Foods Inc. and Wal-Mart.The private inspectors that companies select often check only those areas their clients ask them to review. That means they can miss deadly pathogens lurking in places they never examined.

According to the Bloomberg article, the FDA, who is charged with the safety of our food supply, inspects only 6% of the food production facilities in the country every year. According to the CDC, over 3000 people per year die because of unsafe food production.

The FDA, it seems, is more interested in harassing providers of raw milk, family farms and health food stores. Over the past few years outbreaks of deadly illnesses like salmonella and listeria have affected peanut butter, cantaloupe, eggs, potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce and carrots, all items a healthy eater would be happy to place into his or her shopping cart.

We must all keep in mind the other important function of the FDA: that is aiding their friends at Monsanto. The grocery store roulette game doesn’t end with poor food-handling practices. You know those gorgeous tomatoes that are the reddest red you’ve ever seen or the strawberries that are the size of your fist? Two words: Science Project. And guess who the guinea pigs are?

GMO foods were introduced to the North American food supply in 1994, with the Flavr Savr tomato. No labeling was done, no research on the long-term effects of this genetically spliced lab creation on the human body was performed – the tomato just appeared in produce sections all across America. The tomato was soon followed by such an abundance of genetic modification that by 2006 89 % of the planted area of soybeans, 83 % of cotton, and 61 % maize were genetically modified varieties.

How did Monsanto, the main creator of genetically modified “foods”, get past the FDA, that agency of protection of the health of the American people? It’s easy when you can load the jury with your own people. Here are just a few connections between Monsanto and the federal government:

Just so we’re clear, the label “FDA Approved” now means “The company that produced this product has enough money and clout to allow it to be sold.”

An article by Paul Adams, published by Activist Post, discusses the only long-term study on the effects of GMO, which was performed in France. The study confirmed many disturbing conclusions:

The recent and long-term French study from the University of Caen found that eating genetically modified corn and consuming trace levels of Monsanto’s Roundup chemical fertilizer caused rats to develop horrifying tumors, widespread organ damage, and premature death. This study has been deemed “the most thorough research ever published into the health effects of GM food crops and the herbicide Roundup on rats.”The study found:Up to 50% of males and 70% of females suffered premature death.Rats that drank trace amounts of Roundup (at levels legally allowed in the water supply) had a 200% to 300% increase in large tumors.Rats fed GM corn and traces of Roundup suffered severe organ damage including liver damage and kidney damage.The study fed these rats NK603, the Monsanto variety of GM corn that’s grown across North America and widely fed to animals and humans. This is the same corn that’s in your corn-based breakfast cereal, corn tortillas and corn snack chips.The study caused Russia to ban imports of U.S. GM corn due to the cancer risk. France and most of Europe have effectively banned feeding GM crops to humans and Monsanto was found guilty of ‘chemical poisoning’ earlier this year.

Now, if you manage to somehow avoid the consumption of improperly handled food and GMOs, the next hurdle to avoid is the addition of deadly neurotoxins, which are also approved by the FDA, classified “Generally Recognized as Safe.”

According to Dr. Russell Blaylock, who has dedicated his career to researching these “excitotoxins”: Excitotoxins are food additives that can stimulate nerve cells in the brain to death. The most common excitotoxins in the diet are MSG and aspartame. MSG, in particular, is present in almost all processed foods, but is often called by different names. It can even be in foods labelled ‘No MSG’

Artificial sweeteners such as aspartame and nutrasweet, as well as flavor additives like MSG (and its many aliases) have been proven to cause brain cell death and 230 other side effects, yet the FDA still classifies these products as “safe” for our consumption.

How can we run the grocery store gauntlet and feed our families safe food?

1.) Garden: If possible, produce some of your own food.

2.) Buy organic: organic foods are not genetically modified, however they could have still been handled unsafely.

3.) Be careful of the origin of the foods you buy: some countries do not have the same levels of food safety. Although the US process is lacking, it isn’t as bad as is described in some farms in South and Central America, where workers do not have access to running water.

4.) Avoid processed foods – purchase ingredients instead of items that are “heat and eat”. If you must purchase processed foods, read the label carefully and avoid items with unpronounceable names in the list.

Cantaloupes/melons: scrub the skins with water and a brush before you cut them. (If you do not, cutting them could transfer pathogens from the rind to the flesh).

Berries, lettuce, and other non scrubbable fruits and vegetables: wash them with fast running water. The friction of running water helps remove bacteria. That’s better than soaking.
Wash fruit even if you plan to peel it. If there are microbes on the peel, they can contaminate the rest of the fruit when you peel it.

Eat only cooked sprouts

We can vote with our wallets by refusing to put our health at risk to make the wealthy even richer.